Basically the idea behind it is to hit hard, steal health, heal yourself with regens and wells and have a large HP/Armor pool.

Anyone have suggestions on how I could improve this? Maybe different armor/weapons/sigils/runes? I think the skills and traits are already pretty solid but invite constructive criticism and suggestions :3

So glad I am not the only one trying to make a tank/control Necro. While I understand this is not popular, my Guild and I run instances and kill everything, we don't skip fights. We like to fight things and talk on skype etc. Most the time I fill the front line with my professions and Necro was my next project to build into a very well control fighter up front.

So to your build,

Weapons:
D/F
I find dagger not as useful for tanking, I don't believe the single target damage is worth giving up sceptor or axe slots. I think Axe and Sceptor bring much more into usefulness for your group and dagger is too greedy. But the dagger is great for less then 2 targets and bosses.

The focus is always a win. Such great tools and coupled with wells brings a lot to the table.

Staff
While staff is a great swap spam weaponset, From a Tank/Control perspective you have boon removal, condition transfer, regen to allies, fear and chill. This makes for great swap spam weaponset, but I don't recommend sitting in staff for your build as It does not enhance your Death Shroud and the cooldowns are long. I imagine this was your idea from the start.

Utility slots:
Well of Suffering, Power and Darkness.

To me Darkness is the most attractive I know while most people realize that builds let you swap out abilities as needed and you should never stay on one skillset. Same for weapons. You have available to your build augments to signet, staff and wells cooldowns and also deathshroud enhancements. I would try synergize this as good as you can. The well spam and distribution of each well can be great but I think allows for too much dependancy I would think about adding another shorter utility cooldown into the mix. Look into the signets since you have them traited.

Elite:
Lich Form.

I have not played much with Lich Form as because with my tank build that ill link later allows for better execution. With that said on paper Lich Form looks awesome. To me Plague has just been my go to Elite for some time.

As Dollorian has mentioned, swap lich for plague. Plague is better when trying to be "tanky"
Swap your weapon sigils from leeching to energy.
Also swap greater marks for staff mastery. You can drop mark of blood a couple times on yourself per weapon cooldown, and keep perma regen up on yourself.

That's my thoughts at least. Personally I'd switch the soldier gear for cleric, no real reason to have an insanely high health pool unless someone else is feeding your the hps to make use of it. If you switch to cleric though and thus increase your own healing, you can then just force feed yourself healing to counteract most incoming damage. Granted the high health pool with high armor does make your death shroud extremely durable, it's a personal preference kind of thing I guess.

When I tried the well-tap build I dropped 20 into Curses and Death Magic. Gear was MF, so the build worked fairly well PvE but in dungeons it got a little gnarly. With a full set of Azurite and the right runes, the Cleric or Apothecary set might be better fits, though I really haven't played with the Apothecary set as yet.

Seriously? you want to play tank, which means you can't hit hard, which means you hit like a wet noodle, which means you take forever to kill things, which means you enjoy wasting time.

Why bother?

A full set of zerker gear is around 2200 power his current build is 2100. With zerker he gets crit% and crit dmg%, both which arent too crazy for a necro compared to other classes.

So I doubt he will hit like a wet noodle.

I tried post further on your build of stats and traits but I guess it got lost somehow. I would consider putting a little into healing or condition duration over condition damage, instead of going for full solider. You want these to stick longer and not be concerned with their damage. Boon duration also wouldnt hurt also. I never liked full armor of a set of stats I think its counter productive to how groups of enemies AI is made. Sorry I am not on the full zerker bandwagon.

As mentioned look for better sigils. The life stealing sigils arent too great since they're normalized.

Basically the idea behind it is to hit hard, steal health, heal yourself with regens and wells and have a large HP/Armor pool.

Anyone have suggestions on how I could improve this? Maybe different armor/weapons/sigils/runes? I think the skills and traits are already pretty solid but invite constructive criticism and suggestions :3

I guess this is a decent build....if you run with groups that only have Elementalists that die in 1 hit. This role that you are trying to play should be fullfiled by Knight's Guardians, not optimal at all for Necros.

What? why would crit chance and crit damage be any different on a necro than every other class?

You're wrong, he will hit like a soggy noodle in soldiers gear, power alone is not enough.

The fact you haven't worked out GW2 is all about the DPS and nothing else isn't my problem.

Wow thats a lot of resentment :/

You're right of course in that DPS is the be-all end-all, however it might just be that some people enjoy playing support more and are in a guild with people who don't mind that a run takes a few minutes longer. And maybe their usual group doesn't have a guardian to get aggro and/or a warrior to one-shot everything before it has a chance to move.

On topic: personally on my necro I found that going full DPS still allowed for quite a bit of support because you still have your cripples and blinds and placable wells help quite a bit too. The build looks solid enough, I'm interested to see if it works well enough to negate most of the damage with the constant siphoning or if the current damage input is too high to be effective. Possibly not the best for high level fractals but it might be interesting enough for normal stuff, might give it a try, gives me a reason to dust off the necro

- If you're looking for more tankiness, you could swap the Soldier's Gear for Sentinel's Gear and/or drop the trait points in Spite for Soul Reaping. The Soul Reaping points would pull double duty with your extremely high Vitality, making you nearly unkillable. I used to solo Champion mobs with a build like this when I first got my Necro to level 80.

- If you're looking to make it more useful outside PvE, you could drop the points in Spite and 5 points from Death Magic so that you could get 20 in Curses for the Focused Rituals trait. This would allow you to target allies with your Well of Blood, giving them protection and healing from a distance as well as making your other wells useful when assaulting the walls of Keeps and Towers in WvW.

And kendro1200 is correct in his assessment on your Elite skill. Plague Form is much more tanky than Lich Form because it can offer 20 seconds of AoE perma-blind or 20 seconds of AoE Cripple/Weakness in addition to buffing your Vitality and Toughness. Lich Form is all about the DPS. When your Power stat is through the roof, Lich Form will allow you to spike a target down faster than anything else in your arsenal, but will still crumple like paper if focused, even with a tanky setup.

Necro was my first character and I've tried lots of builds and armor combinations but I never felt, I need more vitality. Necro already has high vit and adding more won't help a lot. In the end you can only take as much damage as you can heal. Investing in healing power is also a bad idea, since it scales too bad. So if you're looking to be more tanky get toughness, aka knights gear. Sentinel gear is the ultimate way of gimping yourself by decreasing you dps even further without gettng any benefits.
That said I don't think a tanky necro is good, simply because of the light armor. Necro has deathshroud and lifesteal, so surviving isn't the problem. However since you have light armor you will need full knights gear to achieve around 3k armor. This is said to be enough to get the initial aggro, though aggro in gw2 works a bit awkward. A guardian can hit 3k armor with knights armor and berserker trinkets and wil still hit harder, than a necro with full knights.

I've been running a condition build for a while using full rabid gear (condition damage / precision / toughness). It was a bit below 3k armor, but I still got lots of aggro. A condition build will probably hit harder than a power based build with full knights, but I haven't tested it, just an assumption. Of course that comes with all the drawbacks of a condition build. My trait layout was 0/30/20/20/0 in case you want to test it.

I personally decided, that going full zerker and focusing on dps is probably still the best you can do as a necro, though your dps will still suck compared to other classes. That said, I don't play my necro a lot anymore (hope it will get buffed at some point).